‘Mac’s a good bloke, but I need you,’ Lily said.
‘Why does Billy trust Mac with you?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘Mac’s a bit the other way,’ Lily told her. ‘You know – he prefers blokes. He hasn’t got a steady feller, just disappears all night sometimes. I don’t ask.’
Elizabeth was profoundly grateful to Lily for providing her with a home. It was even near enough for her to visit her mother, now recovering. Nevertheless, she was far from easy about living a luxurious life involving constant deliveries of flowers, a staff of seven, huge dinner parties for which outside chefs and staff were often hired to assist the regular staff, and a chauffeur-driven Bentley always on tap. And when Billy Webber whirled in, as he stood with one arm round Lily and the other holding the telephone, into which he shouted instructions, there was always an air of threat in the apartment. He was, though, always very polite to Elizabeth. He took a kindly interest in her health without ever tactlessly referring to her coming status as an unmarried mother. He appeared one evening with a trunk containing a costly layette for the baby. This he dumped in the drawing room, then disappeared saying, ‘I’ve got to get back home. The old lady’s brother appeared at the club, says she’s having one of her turns. The doctor’s been called in.’
After he’d gone Elizabeth asked, ‘What are these “turns” Billy’s wife suffers?’
‘God knows,’ Lily told her. ‘Fact is, they haven’t had a normal married life since their wedding. And that was because she said she was pregnant when she wasn’t. Now she lives in luxury with her mum and dad, but it’s not much of a life for a woman. Look, Elizabeth,’ she explained, ‘there’s nothing I can do about that marriage. If it wasn’t me, it’d be somebody else. Billy still wouldn’t live with her. And I need him. I love him. I know what you think of him. You think he’s a thug, but, darling, he’s what I’m used to. I’m not used to gentlemen. I’d make mincemeat of a nicer man. Look what happened when I married one, poor Gordon. It didn’t work. I need a strong man, someone to control me, protect me, someone who knows who I am and what I’m all about. And I need someone with money, or I’d end up keeping them and that’s no good, for a woman, believe me. Don’t talk to me about equality – there’s no such thing for women like me. And for all his faults, Billy’s got a heart of gold.’
‘I like him,’ Elizabeth told her. ‘You know I do. But he’s – well, Lily, he’s intimidating.’
‘It’s dog eat dog in the East End,’ Lily told her. ‘It is if you want to get anywhere.’ There was a silence. ‘I wouldn’t like it if Billy turned against me,’ Lily admitted.
‘I can understand why,’ was all Elizabeth could say.
That winter, the fourth Christmas of the war, streets were grey, people pale, many in mourning. There were air raids. The conflict, embarked on with such patriotic fervour and enthusiasm, had gone on too long, cost too many lives. There were food shortages. Lily bought on the black market, saying, ‘I was poor and hungry for too long to have to go without now.’ But she and Billy Webber took food and clothing down to the East End in cartloads.
Meanwhile Elizabeth had phoned Constance Albury in Scotland. Constance had, as she had promised, opened up her house as an officers’ convalescent home. Now she left it and came down by train immediately, smelling a rat behind Elizabeth’s casual enquiries about money. She had taken Elizabeth into her theatrical company from school and she would never cease to feel some responsibility for her. In addition, perhaps, she was bored. She had recovered to an extent from her grief over Gerry Fitzgerald. The convalescent home was running like clockwork.
Constance arrived in London looking much older, but full of vigour. It took her very little time to prise the brutal facts from Elizabeth. ‘So,’ she said, ‘your agent’s run away with your money; you’re over thirty and pregnant, poor Harry’s dead and you can’t go home to your family. I don’t think there’s any point in going to the Hislops. They’d be very unpleasant, and I doubt if they’d give you any help at all. Tell them when it’s over, if you want to.’
Elizabeth nodded her agreement.
‘Of course,’ Constance went on rapidly, ‘If I were you I’d find a doctor to relieve me of my little burden, but if you want to wreck your life, the decision’s yours. Anyway,’ she continued, ‘this war can’t go on for very much longer. I have it on the best authority. We’ll win, of course. I think it’s time to open up the theatre again. I’ve got a good man I can leave in charge of the convalescents. I’m only a glorified housekeeper there now and, sad as it is to see these young men ruined for life, as many are, the call of the future is strong. I’m going to get what’s left of the old company together. What we need now is amusement. People are weary with tragedy, with asking why it all happened, who was responsible. We’ve got a duty to ourselves and the future. Can you write me a comedy? Don’t tell me you can’t – don’t forget that comedy is tragedy’s other face. The Greeks knew that; so do we, if we’ve got any sense. It’s the only way to look at things now.’
‘I think I should write of what I’ve seen,’ demurred Elizabeth.
‘You can do that in your own time,’ Constance told her remorselessly. ‘While I’m paying, it’s comedy or nothing. Three guineas a week for three months, and at the end of that I expect to see a play. Be sensible; you have a child to think of. If the play’s any good you might yet make enough to keep it until it goes to school. Lily Strugnell’s an angel, but you can’t stay with her for ever. As I see it, for you it’s a comedy or the workhouse.’
‘You’re always so bracing, Constance,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Like standing on Beachy Head in February, wearing only a petticoat.’
‘Well, you can’t expect the world to stop dead for you just because you choose to go in for maternity,’ said Constance. Before she left she handed Elizabeth a banker’s draft for twenty pounds.
Elizabeth bought her mother a cashmere shawl and gave the rest of the money to Lily for her keep, although she realised that the sum was insufficient to keep this expensive household running for even a week.
With a heavy heart she started work on the comedy. To her astonishment, almost to her shame, the play was easy to write. It was a relief to be able to turn away from reality, forget the years in France, the shattered bodies and deaths, and leave the world of newspapers full of the names of the latest casualties, streets teeming with tired, bereaved people, now under no illusions about the cost of the war. In the play she turned to a world where apparently there was no war.
The Poulteney Season was about a couple much like the Warrens in their concern for family pride, money and respectability. Mr and Mrs Poulteney attempted to control and manipulate their children, David and Jenny, in the direction of profit. The young people constantly foiled them. It was comedy verging on farce, but beneath the jokes lay the unquestioning assumption that the Poulteneys were monsters and hypocrites, whose children had to fight them for their very survival as human beings. The play did not mention war, but the implication was that the Poulteneys embodied the generation which had allowed, even, initially, encouraged the terrible conflict.
She sent the play to Constance, who did not expect it so soon and was still tying up loose ends at her convalescent home. Constance read it on the day it arrived, and early next morning a telegram arrived: ‘Excellent. We go into rehearsal in April, open in June, usual terms. Can you play Jenny?’ Constance did not want Elizabeth to be pregnant so was characteristically ignoring the fact. Now Elizabeth cabled back briefly: ‘Delighted. Jenny impossible due to coming confinement.’
Lily and Elizabeth were opening a celebratory bottle of champagne at eleven in the morning when another telegram arrived from Constance, still refusing to consider Elizabeth’s situation: ‘Start on new comedy now for autumn season.’
‘Well, my dear,’ said Lily, ‘congratulations – you’re on you way.’
‘And I owe it: all to you, Lily,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I’d like to go and tell my mother, but I don’t think I c
an get away with it any longer.’ She looked down at her figure, now bulging slightly. ‘I can’t keep on visiting now that the baby shows.’
She had visited Bella twice since she had been rudely evicted from Linden Grove, going on afternoons when she thought Harriet would be out. Once Frannie had been there, in mourning. She was indignant when she heard that Elizabeth had been turned away from Linden Grove. ‘My God!’ she said. ‘And you’d been nursing wounded soldiers.’
‘They gave the excuse that you were coming to live here,’ Elizabeth told her. Black-clad Frannie laughed out loud.
During her brief visits Elizabeth never raised controversial topics with Bella. She told her mother she was very happily sharing comfortable lodgings with a fellow actress and writing a play. She dared not reveal her address in case of a sudden visit from one of the family during the months when her pregnancy would be impossible to conceal.
Her plan was to produce the child later, saying she had adopted it from a friend, perhaps a war widow with a large family to rear. The war had produced all kinds of family confusion and tragedy. Few questions would be asked and any suspicion that she was the child’s natural mother would, without evidence, remain only a suspicion. She had not decided whether to tell the Hislops the truth.
Lily had tried to persuade her to tell her own family about the coming child. ‘Say you’re a widow,’ she urged. ‘Or just say you were going to get married and the man was killed.’ But Elizabeth argued that such a story would give rise to complications and further lies. It was best simply to disappear and turn up with the child. In any case, at that moment she had only a vague grasp on the future. Her plans only extended up to the time of her baby’s birth.
Now, unhappily, the time was coming when she would have to cease visiting her mother. ‘It’s a curse,’ she told Lily, ‘that this fashion for straight dresses operates against me. You could conceal many a bulge in the days of Queen Victoria.’
‘I’ll go round from time to time,’ Lily offered. ‘I’ll say you’re writing your play in the country.’
What Lily saw when she visited the Warren household disturbed her, but she kept her thoughts to herself, especially as Elizabeth was working on her next play, which was proving more difficult. She was anxious to finish it before her confinement. ‘If only the baby would come sooner,’ she sighed. ‘I can’t even go to the first night of my own play; too many people might recognise me. And if the news got back to Linden Grove, Aunt Harriet and Uncle Robert would gloat and Mother would die of shame.’
‘It’s a rotten state of affairs, I must say,’ declared Lily.
It was late at night. They were in Lily’s bedroom. Lily was brushing out her hair while Elizabeth lay on the satin cover of her large bed.
‘Them’s the rules,’ Elizabeth said, looking at the cupids Lily had ordered to be painted on the ceiling. ‘Do it but don’t get found out.’
‘The woman always pays. Never mind – what’s a first night between friends?’ Lily encouraged.
‘Oh, to think of them all putting the play together while I sit alone knitting bootees,’ Elizabeth said glumly. ‘I’ll have to move when it’s born, Lily. You’ve been kind, but I can’t impose a screaming baby…’
‘See about all that when the time comes,’ Lily said comfortably.
Elizabeth did not pursue the conversation. ‘You’re sure Dr Williamson uses ether?’ she questioned.
‘All the best people have Dr Williamson at their confinements,’ Lily assured her. ‘The best people don’t pay doctors to let them suffer. Except the Stillwells,’ she added, remembering her own confinement. Digby was still living at Crewe End Hall, with his grandfather and his Great-Aunt Caroline. Gordon had given up trying to get her to go back to him and had asked for an official separation. Lily had agreed. ‘It’s no good bothering about the boy,’ she told Elizabeth cheerfully. ‘They’ve got him now. He’s better off where he is.’
Elizabeth found her friend’s attitude to motherhood casual, if not negligent, but did not offer any comment.
Chapter Forty–Two
On the first night of the Poulteney Season Elizabeth was at home on her own, only a week away from her confinement, restless and uncomfortable and very disappointed about missing the opening of her play. She tried reading, got up, wandered about the room, sat down again. She could not prevent herself from following the course of the play in her mind. At the exact moment when she thought the curtain must have gone down she sighed, patted her swollen stomach and said aloud into the empty room, ‘Well, the die is cast – let’s hope it’s gone well, baby, because it’s all we’ve got between us and starvation.’ She was apprehensive about the birth, her future and that of the child. Life would not be easy for a woman bringing up an illegitimate child alone, with no certain source of income.
That was when the doorbell rang; there was the sound of excited voices in the hall. Constance, Lilah who was playing Jenny, the Poulteney daughter, and Edward Stott who was playing her father, all came in. They were the only members of the original company left, and the only three who knew about the predicament of the author of the play. They were triumphant, brimming with cheerfulness. They brought champagne and the news that the play had been a great success. ‘A million laughs, dear,’ Lilah said. ‘And so many curtain calls. It’s nothing short of a tragedy you couldn’t be there.’
‘They were rocking, rocking with laughter,’ Edward said.
‘It’s an absolute triumph,’ Constance told her. ‘But we had to rush here to tell you. I’m thinking of a run of at least two months. More, if it’ll stand it. I knew it! I knew it! It’s got just the right blend of comedy and thought – just a subtle edge of challenge, criticism. It’s the play for today – I knew it. What’s more important, the audience knew it too.’
‘Underneath it says that you can’t trust the generation that got the country into the war,’ declared Lilah. ‘That’s what people want to hear.’
‘I don’t think that’s the point,’ protested Edward. ‘I don’t think that would be the right thing to say at this moment, anyway.’
‘Be as upstanding and as patriotic as you like, Edward,’ said Lilah. ‘I know I’m right.’
‘I sincerely hope not,’ he told her. ‘I think it’s simply an admirable comedy, with none of the bad taste you suggest.’
‘Don’t let’s argue,’ Constance declared. ‘We have a success. Such a pity you couldn’t have been with us, Elizabeth.’
Elizabeth wiped away a tear. ‘So many of our friends couldn’t be with us,’ she said in a low voice. She thought of Harry, Gerry Fitzgerald and all the others who had been killed. The war still continued, only a hundred miles from where they were now. It seemed trivial to be sitting on a warm night in this elegant drawing room, celebrating the success of a stage comedy.
Constance sat down abruptly. ‘We won’t forget them. We don’t forget them. We’ll never be able to forget them.’
‘They sacrificed themselves for their country,’ Edward said.
‘What sort of a country is it that demands such a huge sacrifice?’ demanded Lilah.
‘That’s a very odd question to ask.’
‘Well, I’m not the only one who’s asking it,’ she said stoutly.
‘The thought’s with us all the time, spoken or unspoken,’ Constance said. ‘There will be bitterness, and sadness. We go on. We have to go on. But we’ll never be able to forget.’
Mac came in, unaware of this conversation, and began to play the piano. Later, Lily arrived. They sat up until it was time to send a servant for the early editions of the morning papers. Elizabeth, who was asleep in her chair by this time, woke up to hear Mac mugging a triumphant. ‘Lift up your heads’ from the Messiah, while Lilah called out, ‘Daily Telegraph: “The most amusing play on the London stage today, indeed for many a long day”.’
‘“Enough to make Mr Wilde turn in his grave, as green with envy as his own carnation” – The Graphic,’ read out Edward, adding, ‘I say, that
’s a bit obscure, isn’t it?’
‘“Excellent cast – vast brio – verbal wit” – mumble mumble – The Times,’ Lily read.
No one, not even Elizabeth, could think of sleep. They ended up walking in the dewy grass of Hyde Park just after dawn. Elizabeth took her shoes off and thought: The play’s a success. Now it’s only a matter of the baby.
Later that morning, though, came bad news. Mac, Elizabeth and Lily, together with Lilah, who had stayed on, were eating a very late breakfast at midday when a maid came to say that Elizabeth had an urgent caller, who would not go away when told she was not at home. The visitor’s name was Cora Warren.
‘Damn!’ exclaimed Elizabeth. ‘Cora! How did she find me?’
‘Your name’s on posters all over London,’ Lily told her. ‘She must have gone to the theatre and got the address. We should have warned them. I’ll see her. Take the lady to the small sitting room,’ she told the maid. ‘I’ll find out what it is and get rid of her.’ But she was soon back, with Cora, who was dressed in a severe navy suit and white blouse.
When Cora took in the sight of Elizabeth, in a smock, sitting with the coffee pot in her hand, she said, ‘I can see now why you haven’t been round.’
‘Why are you here?’ asked Elizabeth.
Mac made a face at Lily. Lily shook her head.
‘Aunt Bella’s very ill. I went to the theatre and made them tell me where you were.’
‘How ill?’ asked Elizabeth, very alarmed.
‘Pneumonia. She’s only been ill for three days, but she’s getting worse and worse. The doctor’s not hopeful.’ Cora’s first, uncharitable, Warren-style reaction had faded. She looked pityingly at Elizabeth. ‘You ought to see her, but…’
‘Oh God,’ said Elizabeth. She felt as if she had been physically attacked. She did not know what to do.
Lily showed presence of mind. ‘Mac,’ she said firmly, ‘go upstairs and put on your best suit.’ Mac thought for a moment, then nodded. He went out. ‘It’s the only way,’ Lily said. ‘You, Miss Warren, will go along with the story that when you came here you found Elizabeth married. She kept it a secret because he’s a penniless musician. If you’ve got anything to you, you’ll co-operate. If you don’t…’ she threatened.
Elizabeth and Lily Page 43
